Anastasia Charalambos Loizou was the sole director of Little Nicks Barbers 2 Limited in Winchmore in north London and has been banned from being a director for nine years after committing bounce back fraud.

During the pandemic Loizou applied for a bounce back loan and claimed the turnover for the business was £300,000. In reality, the business only earned £61,659 for the financial year ending 31 March 2020, and £67,193 the previous year.

This breached the terms of the bounce back loan scheme which was supposed to help struggling  businesses during covid.

By inflating her turnover, on 7 May 2020 Loizou was given a maximum loan of £50,000 when she was not eligible for that amount.

Based on earnings, she would only have been entitled to £16,799, equivalent to 25% of turnover.

The turnover figure required was that for the calendar year 2019 or where a business was established after 1 January 2019 it was their estimated turnover from the date the business started.

The barbers was incorporated on 14 March 2016 and started trading immediately. However, it never earned anywhere near £300,000 in the four years preceding the pandemic.

The overstatement of turnover meant Little Nicks Barbers 2 received £33,201 more than it was entitled to from the bounce back scheme.

Having secured the loan and only paid back a few thousand pounds, two years later in May 2022, a winding up petition was brought against the business.

Little Nicks Barbers 2 went into liquidation following a creditors voluntary liquidation with debts of £71,805, including £46,969 for the bounce back loan.

As well as the covid loan, Loizou owed HMRC £6,186.47 when the company went bust but this will not be recovered. The insolvency practitioners from Begbies Traynor said they could ‘not identify any recovery actions that could be taken for the benefit of the creditors’.

The Insolvency Service director ban took effect on 6 March for nine years.